I knew that some ñ‘s came from gn, but the ng words were a surprise. The third group is a Latin gn or ng sequence as in enseñar from Latin insignare.An example is año, from Latin annus. Pleasingly, the suffix -eño has a dual origin, with one derivational path of the ne/ni type (seen in words like isleño) and another of the nn type (seen in pequeño). The next most common origin is a Latin double nn this is the source of the tilde (~) itself.An example is España, from Latin Hispania. (The y sound had a similar effect on other consonants, not just n, and the resulting changes are referred to as palatalization.) When followed by another vowel, the e or i turned into a y sound, which in turn had a transformative effect on the n. The most common origin is therefore the first one you see in the table: a Latin ne or ni.The types themselves are ordered by frequency. The table is sorted by Type, meaning the type of the word’s origin within each type, words are listed in alphabetical order. The results are below, in tabular form so you can play with the words yourself if you like. Then I couldn’t resist going back in time: I knew that the ñ sound had several different origins, but was curious to see how this worked out statistically. This started as a plain list of 57 words. here), and today decided to make a list of reasonably common Spanish words that use this characteristic letter. I’ve had the wonderful Spanish ñ on my mind lately (see e.g.
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